01jun06

Colombia's 'Narco-Presidente'.

Across South America, voters – fed up with what many see as deep-seated
economic inequality and political injustice – have rejected Washington’s
preferred candidates and elected populist or center-left alternatives.
But Colombia’s reelection of President Alvaro Uribe Velez has bucked
that regional trend.

Winning about 60 percent of the vote on May 28, Uribe now stands as
South America’s last right-wing head of state, a lonely voice siding
with George W. Bush. Diminutive and thin-skinned, the 53-year-old Uribe
also remains an anti-communist hard-liner fighting an insurgency dating
back to the Cold War.

Uribe’s reelection sets the stage, too, for a new round of confrontation
between the Bush administration and the populist government of Hugo
Chavez from oil-rich Venezuela, which borders Colombia to the east and
which has spearheaded the region’s drive for greater independence from
the policies of Washington and the International Monetary Fund.

Tensions between Colombia and Venezuela have threatened to boil over in
recent years, with Colombian officials accusing Venezuela of supporting
leftist guerillas known as the FARC and Venezuelans suspecting Colombia
of aiding U.S. efforts to destabilize and eliminate the Chavez
government, which has withstood several coup attempts.

In the past few months, evidence has emerged to support some of those
Venezuelan suspicions. Rafael Garcia, a cashiered official of Colombia’s
federal police agency (DAS), alleged that the DAS plotted to assassinate
Chavez.

Garcia, the former DAS chief of information systems, was accused of
taking bribes to erase police files that incriminated right-wing
paramilitary leaders. He then went public describing the Colombian plot
to kill Chavez, as well as DAS help for narco-traffickers connected to a
right-wing “death squad,” the United Self-Defense Forces, known as the AUC.

Garcia also alleged that the AUC murdered union activists and engineered
voter fraud four years ago to help Uribe get elected.

Uribe lashed out at the press for printing Garcia’s accusations, but
other Colombian officials vowed to clean up DAS corruption. The new DAS
director Andres Penate boasted of firing 49 DAS officials suspected of
wrongdoing.

But Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said
Penate faces a tough challenge because “the DAS has been fully
penetrated by drug traffickers and paramilitary mafias.” [Reuters, April
20, 2006]

Landslide Victory

In the May 28 election, despite these allegations, Uribe won a landslide
victory over left-of-center Democratic Pole candidate Carlos Gaviria.
Despite a late surge in popularity at the expense of a centrist
candidate, Gaviria came in a distant second with 20 percent. But public
enthusiasm for Uribe was less than overwhelming, with 55 percent of
eligible voters abstaining from voting.

To many of these Colombians, Uribe has failed to live up to his press
clippings, at least those common in the mainstream U.S. news media,
hailing him as a popular, Harvard-educated, free-market stalwart and
Washington’s No. 1 ally in the “drug war.”

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and its Colombian
counterparts, Colombia remains the dominant source for cocaine and
heroin in the U.S. market. Some estimates indicate that Colombia
produces 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States and 60
percent of the heroin (much of the rest coming from Afghanistan since
Washington ousted the Taliban government after 9/11 and restored power
to Afghan warlords.

DEA and other drug authorities also believe that the biggest share of
Colombia's multibillion-dollar northbound drug trade is controlled by
the paramilitary AUC, the violent right-wing group with which Uribe’s
government has allegedly collaborated.

Garcia, the former DAS official, alleged that AUC thugs used
intimidation and fraud to give Uribe 300,000 of his 5.3 million votes in
the 2002 election. During Uribe’s first term, the AUC also appears to
have increased its penetration of key government agencies, including the
DAS, roughly the equivalent of Colombia’s FBI.

In its reliance on Washington’s advice and in its continuing
counterinsurgency war, Colombia also seems stuck in a Cold War
political/economic model. Yet, despite U.S. investment of billions of
dollars, most of it through what was known as “Plan Colombia,” the
problem with the political violence and the drug trafficking never seems
to get much better and arguably gets worse.

As author Peter Dale Scott notes in his 2003 book, Drugs, Oil and War,
“U.S. involvement in Colombia has escalated by stages since the original
commitment to a counterinsurgency program under the Kennedy
administration… At every stage, U.S. programs have aggravated the
problem they are attempting to deal with.”

History of Violence

Colombia’s long history of violence – the origins of which Scott lays at
the doorstep of a feudalistic oligarchy that dispossessed peasants and
subjugated laborers with impunity – predates the first U.S. intervention
in the early 1960s. (The 15-year-long “La Violencia” period began with
the 1948 assassination of a popular presidential candidate.)

Furthermore, the crystallization of what had previously been a
fragmented left-wing underground into an armed revolutionary guerilla
movement, occurred in response, not prior, to U.S. intervention.

Washington intervened in Colombia after the Indochinese and Cuban
revolutions of the 1950s. Throughout the Cold War, but particularly then
and in the Reagan era, the U.S. government viewed political developments
through red-tinted glasses, seeing evidence of Soviet expansionism in
every revolutionary movement.

Determined to block another revolution in Latin America, Washington
applied new CIA counterinsurgency techniques in Colombia.

“In February 1962,” Scott writes, “a U.S. Special Warfare team, headed
by General William Yarborough, visited [Colombia] for two weeks.”
Following that visit, “the Special Warfare experts at Fort Bragg rushed
to instruct the Colombian army in …counterinsurgency techniques…

“[Gen. Yarborough] recommended development of a ‘civil and military
structure… to perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and
as necessary execution, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities [emphasis
added] against known communist proponents. … In the wake of Yarborough’s
visit, a series of training teams arrived, contributing to the Colombian
Army’s Plan Lazo, a comprehensive counterinsurgency plan implemented
between 1962 and 1965.”

As result, according to counterinsurgency historian Michael McClintock,
“The banditry of the early 1960s…was transformed into organized
revolutionary guerilla warfare after 1965, which has continued to date.”

Worse yet, Plan Lazo also spawned the paramilitary death squads that
today control much of the narcotics traffic and about 30 percent of the
Colombian legislature.

A key element of Fort Bragg’s concept of counterinsurgency, according to
training manuals cited by Scott, was “the organization of ‘self-defense
units’ and other paramilitary groups, including ‘hunter-killer teams.’
The thinking and nomenclature of these field manuals were translated and
cited in the Colombian army’s counter-guerilla manual, Reglamento de
Combate de Contraguerillas.

“It defined the self-defense group (junta de auto-defensa) as ‘an
organization of a military nature made up of select civilian personnel
from the combat zone who are trained and equipped to carry out actions
against groups of guerillas.’ The autodefensas [as the paramilitaries
became known] have been a scourge ever since.”

More Fires

In the 1970s, Washington continued to pour fuel onto Colombia’s fires.

The CIA, Scott writes, “offered further training to Colombian and other
Latin American police officers at its so-called bomb school in Los
Fresnos, Texas. There AID [the Agency for International Development],
under the CIA’s so-called Public Safety Program, taught a curriculum
including ‘Terrorist Concepts; Terrorist Devices; Fabrication and
Functioning of Devices’ Improvised Triggering Devices; Incendiaries,’
and ‘Assassination Weapons: A discussion of various weapons which may be
used by the assassin.’ During congressional hearings, AID officials
admitted that the so-called bomb school offered lessons not in bomb
disposal but in bomb making.

“Trained terrorist counterrevolutionaries thus became assets of the
Colombian security apparatus. They were also employed by U.S.
corporations anxious to protect their workforces from unionization as
well as in anti-union campaigns by Colombian suppliers to large U.S.
corporations. Oil companies in particular have been part of the
state-coordinated campaign against left-wing guerillas.”

According to more mainstream versions of how the “death squads” were
born, rich landowners living in fear of kidnapping by leftist guerillas
paid protection money to right-wing militias. By 1981, the right-wing
militias had morphed into civilian-murdering squads operating alongside
the Colombian army.

Scott notes that the leftist guerillas also kidnapped drug kingpins, who
joined with the army and established a training school for a nationwide
counterterrorist network, Muerte a Sequestradores (MAS, Death to
Kidnappers).

The traffickers put up the money and the generals contracted for Israeli
and British mercenaries to come to Colombia to run the school. A leading
graduate was Carlos Castano, who later became head of the AUC, which
carried out the murders of hundreds of civilian opposition leaders and
peace activists.

The Colombian legislature outlawed the autodefensas in 1989. But,
according to a 1996 report by Human Rights Watch, the CIA and Colombian
authorities cloned new ones.

Writing in the Progressive in 1998, Frank Smyth reported that “In the
name of fighting drugs, the CIA financed new military intelligence
networks [in Colombia] in 1991. But the new networks did little to stop
drug traffickers. Instead, they incorporated illegal paramilitary groups
into their ranks and fostered death squads.

“These death squads killed trade unionists, peasant leaders,
human-rights workers, journalists and other suspected ‘subversives.’ The
evidence, including secret Colombian military documents, suggests that
the CIA may be more interested in fighting a leftist resistance movement
than in combating drugs.”

Implicated Americans

Some U.S. Army personnel also appear to have been corrupted by the easy
drug money. Laurie Hiatt, wife of Col. James Hiatt, the Army’s top
counter-narcotics official in Colombia, was arrested for smuggling
cocaine to New York City.

Hiatt, who was regularly briefed the U.S. military’s anti-drug spy
flights, was himself convicted for helping his wife launder drug profits.

While FARC guerillas have financed their operations by taxing coca
farmers in the south, right-wing AUC paramilitaries in the north have
controlled actual cocaine production and transportation to the U.S. – in
partnership with Colombia’s corrupt armed forces.

In November 1998, a military plane that never left the Colombian air
force’s hands landed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with 1,600 pounds of
cocaine. Just last week Colombian soldiers ambushed and wiped out an
elite 10-member police counter-narcotics team and their informer, as
they were about to make a major drug seizure.

Other evidence also points to links between drug lords and Uribe’s inner
circle.

Between 1997 and 1998, U.S. Custom agents in California seized three
Colombia-bound ships carrying 25 tons of potassium permanganate, a key
precursor chemical in the production of cocaine, NarcoNews reported in
2002. The 25 tons were enough to produce 500,000 kilos of cocaine with a
U.S. street value of $15 billion.

All three shipments were headed for GMP Productos Quimicos in Medellin,
whose owner according to the DEA was Pedro Juan Moreno, Uribe’s former
campaign manager, chief of staff and right-hand man.

While chief of staff to Uribe, Moreno set up armed vigilante groups
known as Convivirs (Rural Vigilence Committees). According to Amnesty
International, Convivirs was a cover for government-funded training
camps and recruiting agencies for paramilitary death squads.

They committed so many bloody massacres that Colombia’s government was
forced to ban Convivirs in 1997. But instead of turning in their
weapons, they were allowed to join Carlos Castano’s AUC paramilitary
organization.

Under Uribe, the Colombian military has focused on subduing FARC,
especially in regions where Occidental Petroleum and other U.S.
companies are extracting oil. It also helped Uribe’s re-election that,
at least partly as result of that focus, kidnappings and other crimes
went down sharply.

The Drug Apple Cart

However, six years later, after Washington's investment of $4 billion in
Plan Colombia and additional hundreds of millions in its wake, the
supply of cocaine to the North American market has hardly been dented.
That’s because Uribe has done little to upset the AUC apple cart.

Uribe did push through legislation called the “Justice and Peace Law,”
which ostensibly was designed to demobilize the AUC.

In a May 26, 2006, editorial, the New York Times wrote that the law “was
supposed to offer paramilitary fighters incentives to put down their
guns… [but] instead… let them continue their criminal activities
undisturbed…

“Now the Constitutional Court has strengthened the demobilization law …
[requiring that AUC members] confess in full to their crimes and provide
the authorities with the information necessary to dismantle these
criminal gangs. The court also struck down a provision that would have
given prosecutors a cripplingly short time to prepare cases.”

Significantly, the editorial continues, “Uribe’s administration has
twice written bills that restrict the jurisdiction of the Constitutional
Court, which is the most important remaining check on the president’s
power. Uribe may try again if he is elected to a second term on Sunday.

“He enjoys the backing of Washington, which considers him a
counterweight to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. The American ambassador,
William Wood, has enthusiastically supported Mr. Uribe’s sweetheart deal
for the paramilitaries.”

Now Colombians have re-elected Uribe who, like his good friend and
fellow Ivy Leaguer, George Bush, models himself after absolute monarchs
like Louis XV of France who is said to have declared, “Après moi le
deluge” (after me, the flood; his heir, Louis XVI, was toppled by the
French Revolution and ultimately decapitated).

Uribe, before the May 28 vote, simply warned his countrymen, “it’s
either me or catastrophe.”

[Source: By Jerry Meldon, Consortiumnews.com, 01jun06]

This document has been published on 08jun06 by the Equipo Nizkor and Derechos Human Rights. In accordance with
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